AllMusic

• 1. Introduction

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  AllMusic began with a single bad purchase. In the early 1990s, Michael Erlewine bought a compact disc he believed contained early recordings by Little Richard. What he received instead was, in his own words, a "flaccid latter-day rehash." The packaging gave him no reliable way to know what he was buying. That frustration set him on a path to build an open-access guide to recorded music. How does personal irritation become a database of millions of recordings? And what does it take to keep one alive?

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• 2. The Unlikely Founder

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  Erlewine had been described as a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar, and musician." His interest in computers grew from astrological work he pursued in the mid-1970s. In 1977, he founded a software company called Matrix. Those years of building data systems gave him a template he would later apply to music.

  In 1990, Erlewine established All Music Guide in Big Rapids, Michigan. His stated goal was to document every recording "since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost." That ambition, invoking one of the earliest commercially recorded voices, set a nearly boundless outer limit for the project. Building that catalog required collaborators Erlewine did not yet have, including a database engineer named Vladimir Bogdanov.

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• 3. The Team and the Taxonomy

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  Vladimir Bogdanov built the database architecture for All Music Guide. Erlewine recruited his nephew, writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine, to handle editorial content. Chris Woodstra came on as an engineer in 1993. His background included writing for alternative publications and fanzines; the organization pointed to his "encyclopedic knowledge of music" as his main qualification.

  A taxonomy of 1,400 subgenres became one of AllMusic's defining features. Writing in Tedium in 2016, journalist Ernie Smith called the site possibly "one of the most ambitious sites of the early-internet era." Smith noted that AllMusic tracked not just reviews and albums, but styles, genres, and subgenres, the tone of music, and the platforms on which music was sold. That connected data could describe an entire type of music, Smith argued, "whether a massive genre like classical, or a tiny one like sadcore." Smith called the site "fundamental to our understanding of pop culture." The database went online in 1994, though its initial form owed more to the pre-web internet than to anything resembling a modern website.

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• 4. From Print to Pixels

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  The first All Music Guide reached readers in 1992 not as a website but as a 1,200-page reference book, packaged with a CD-ROM. The full title promised coverage of "the Best Releases from Thousands of Artists in All Types of Music." Two years later, the database was accessible online, but not through anything resembling a modern website. The initial internet version ran as a text-based Gopher site, presenting information through layered menus rather than clickable pages. As web browsers became more user-friendly, AllMusic migrated to the World Wide Web. Its commercial value would attract a buyer before the decade was out.

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• 5. Sale and Relocation

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  Alliance Entertainment Corp. paid a reported $3.5 million for All Music in 1996. Erlewine sold the company and then departed. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1999, and its assets were acquired by the Yucaipa Equity Fund, run by Ron Burkle.

  That same year, AllMusic relocated from Big Rapids to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The staff expanded from twelve to a hundred people. By February 1999, the team had cataloged 350,000 albums and two million tracks. The site carried 30,000 artist biographies and 120,000 record reviews. The 300 essays were written by people the organization called "a hybrid of historians, critics, and passionate collectors." PC Magazine named AllMusic one of its "Top 100 Classic Websites" in August 2007, months before a far larger transaction closed.

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• 6. Changing Hands

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  In late 2007, TiVo Corporation purchased AllMusic for $72 million. The company was known as Macrovision at the time of the sale; it later renamed itself Rovi, then became TiVo in 2016.

  In 2012, AllMusic removed all information about Bryan Adams from the site at the artist's request. The removal was unusual for a database that had set out to document every recording in existence.

  BlinkX, a company later renamed RhythmOne, acquired AllMusic in 2015. The database runs on a combination of MySQL and MongoDB. Together, those two systems support a catalog of well over three million album entries and thirty million tracks. The database that RhythmOne inherited had also supported a parallel series of printed reference books reaching readers entirely outside the website.

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• 7. The Printed Guides

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  Vladimir Bogdanov, who built the original database architecture, served as president and main editor of the printed guide series. The series grew from a single general music guide into a collection of genre-specific titles. Separate volumes addressed classical music, country, jazz, blues, rock, soul, hip-hop, and electronica, each using "Definitive Guide" as part of its subtitle.

  The All Music Guide to Jazz went through four editions, the first in 1994 and the last in 2002. The main popular music guide reached its fifth edition in 2008. The Blues guide ran to three editions, the final appearing in 2003. The series also produced annual guides; volumes covering the recordings of 2002 and 2003 appeared in 2003 and 2004 respectively. The Required Listening guides for classic rock, country, and old-school rap and hip-hop arrived in 2007 and 2008. They were among the final entries in a printed series that had run in parallel with the website for more than fifteen years.

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